Outside The Pane

About “Outside The Pane”

“Outside The Pane” is a piece I wrote for Aislinn Bailie in 2017.
The piece was premiered on October 10th, 2017 by Aislinn Bailie at Vanderbilt Universty’s Blair School of Music.”Outside The Pane” is a challenging piece requiring the performer to quickly alternate between playing bassoon and speak/singing throughout the piece. When writing this piece, I was trying to capture the sounds of a contemporary pop song while being limited to a single line of music. This resulted in the arpeggiated bassoon lines and the struggle of the performer covering both vocal and accompaniment duties. In addition to the struggle of alternating between playing and singing, the text provides additional challenges as it heavily features stuttered syllables and homophonic wordplay.I composed the text for this piece at the same time I composed the music. “Outside The Pane” is a re-telling of the story of Noah’s Ark from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Instead of focusing on Noah, his family, and the animals he has saved on the ark, this re-telling turns the focus towards Noah looking out of the ark, watching the destruction of the world around him.Thank you to Aislinn Bailie for letting me experiment with bassoon music, helping me flesh out the narrative of this piece, and for being awesome in general!

ru- ru- running down as the falling
falling rain rain falling rain falling
rain rain falling fall. out.going to see outside the out out
going to see outside the pane
flaying down as flying down is hard
looking to see outside the pain paneflooding the land, my landseeing out I cannot be seeing it’s a sea
I’m looking outside of the window pane
flooding it is flooding it flow flooding
how do I stop outside the panecold is the water
outside the water
outside of the panelook into my eyes and see my eyes
look into my eyes and the seaoutside of the pain pane
outside of the outside of the panelooking looking down on the falling
looking on the outside of the pane
looking on the outside of the pain
outside of the pain pane
outside of the pane